Frozen pipe bursts, causes extensive water damage at Daisy Baker’s

Jared Horton, owner of Daisy Baker’s at 33 Second St. in downtown Troy, N.Y., takes a visual assesment of the water damage in the restaurant’s kitchen after a frozen pipe burst in the early morning hours of Thursday, Dec. 19, 2013.
Ian Benjamin — The Record

The kitchen at Daisy Baker’s restaurant in downtown Troy, N.Y. is expected to be a total loss as a result of extensive water damage after a frozen pipe burst during the early morning hours of Thursday, Dec. 19, 2013.
Ian Benjamin — The Record

TROY >> Daisy Baker’s Fine Dining and Bacchus Wood-Fired Pizza have suffered severe water damage after a pipe burst overnight at the restaurants’ Second Street location.

When the owner of Bacchus, Jim Scully, came into the building at 33 Second St. at around 8:30 a.m. on Thursday morning, he found water on his bottom floor restaurant’s kitchen. It was much worse in Daisy Baker’s, which occupies the floor above, where he found a waterfall flowing near the antique piano kept in the main dining room.

“It was a nightmare,” said Scully.

A water pipe in a bathroom on one of the upper floors of 33 Second St. had apparently frozen Wednesday night and burst, flooding the bottom two floors of the historic building in downtown Troy, said Scully. The bathroom in question not been used since Unity House, a local nonprofit, moved its offices out of the building in the fall.

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While Bacchus only lost a walk-in cooler and was open for dinner on Thursday, Daisy Baker’s suffered extensive damage that destroyed much of the restaurant’s professional kitchen.

“When we came in this morning it was a devastating loss in the kitchen,” said Jared Horton, of Daisy Baker’s.

The damage will likely cost Horton several hundred thousand dollars, said Scully. The water was several inches deep in Daisy Baker’s kitchen, which will likely have rendered most of the equipment inoperable, and because the water flowed down through the walls, the kitchen will need to be gutted. However, that cannot begin until an engineer assesses the building, said Horton, because some of the structural beams may have also been damaged during the incident.

It will likely be months before Daisy Baker’s can reopen, said Horton, but he intends to reopen.

“We’re working as fast as we can to try and reopen, but it seems this might be a rather long, drawn-out process because of the legal woes of this building as far as who has ownership,” said Horton.

Obtaining insurance reimbursements for that damage could be a tricky affair, as the building is still-owned by Sanford J. Horowitz, a former local developer who is in the midst of bankruptcy proceedings. It is expected that SEFCU, a local credit union, will be foreclosing on the property.